Financioo

The problem

The group was closing its books in a Laravel application nobody maintained any more, with a chart of accounts that had drifted per branch until no two sets of books could be compared.

Accounting is unforgiving in a way most software is not: a journal that does not balance is not a degraded experience, it is a wrong answer. And "roughly right" reports are worse than no reports, because somebody makes a decision on them.

The approach

A hierarchical chart of accounts shared across the group, with separate books per business unit so a branch can be read alone or consolidated. Journals are balanced at the point of entry — an unbalanced entry is rejected, not saved and flagged.

Reports are computed from the journals rather than stored: general ledger, worksheet, profit and loss, balance sheet. That means a corrected entry corrects every report at once, which is the whole reason to keep a ledger in the first place.

Excel import handles the years of history that had to come across, and period closing locks a month so a late entry cannot silently reopen a set of books that has already been reported on.

The outcome

Live and in use for the group''s monthly close, replacing the legacy application.

Branches share one chart of accounts, so consolidation is a query rather than a spreadsheet exercise.